The innovations and related subject matter disclosed herein (collectively referred to as the “disclosure”) concern systems configured to transfer heat, and more particularly, but not exclusively, to systems having a modular configuration. Some examples of such systems are described in relation to cooling electronic components, though the disclosed innovations may be used in a variety of other heat-transfer applications. Manifolded heat exchangers (sometimes referred to in the art as “heat exchanging manifolds”) suitable for such systems are described as examples of but one of several innovative aspects of disclosed systems.
As cloud-based and other services grow, the number of networked computers and computing environments, including servers, has substantially increased and is expected to continue to grow.
Typical commercially-available servers comprise one or more printed circuit boards having a plurality of operable, heat dissipating devices (e.g., integrated electronic components, such as, for example, memory, chipsets, microprocessors, hard drives, etc.). As used herein, the term “heat dissipater” refers to any device or component that dissipates waste heat during operation. Such printed circuit boards are commonly housed in an enclosure. Some enclosures have vents configured to direct external air, e.g., from the data center, into, through and out of the enclosure. Such air can absorb heat dissipated by the operable components. After exhausting from the enclosure, the heated air usually mixes with air in the data center and an air conditioner cools the heated data center air, consuming large amounts of energy in the process. Other servers are sealed, or otherwise significantly inhibit introduction of air from outside the server into the server.
Some relatively higher performance server components dissipate correspondingly more power. Accordingly, many heat exchangers for removing heat dissipated by such components have been proposed. As but one example, modular device-to-liquid heat exchangers have been proposed, as in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/189,476, and related applications.
Some data centers provide conditioned heat transfer media to racks and/or servers therein. For example, some data centers provide relatively lower-temperature air, water, or other working fluid suitable for use in absorbing and removing waste heat from a computing environment, computing installation, or computing facility.
Some proposed systems for transferring heat from heat dissipaters (e.g., within a server) to an environment have been expensive and/or difficult to implement. For example, some systems have been configured to circulate facility water into each server within a rack. However, as cooling system demands evolve over time, some future servers might be incompatible with water connections provided by some facilities, possibly limiting adoption of new generations of servers. Other deficiencies of proposed systems include increased part counts and assembly costs.
Therefore, there exists a need for effective and low-cost cooling systems for cooling electronic components, such as, for example, an array of rack mounted servers within a data center, or several arrays of servers within one or among several data centers. There also remains a need for heat-transfer systems associated with computing installations or computing facilities to be compatible with commercially available heat exchangers (e.g., modular device-to-liquid heat exchangers) suitable for use with computing environments, such as, for example, servers. A need remains for facility systems configured to remove heat from one or more servers within a given array of servers. In particular, but not exclusively, there remains a need for reliable cooling systems configured to transfer heat from one or more arrays of servers to a facility heat-transfer medium. A need also remains for such cooling systems to be modular. Such systems should be easy to assemble.